WAML News

Please mark your calendars and save the date for the:

2019 WAML Annual Conference

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September 18-21, 2019
Reno, Nevada

We’re excited to announce that registration is now open for the 2019 WAML (Western Association of Map Libraries) Conference in Reno, Nevada! Join us this September 18-21 at the University of Nevada, Reno for what is looking to be a great WAML conference.

In celebration of the interdisciplinary character of mapping, this year’s annual meeting will highlight the growing fields of Spatial Humanities and STEAM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics).

Note: If you are planning to stay at the conference hotel, please make your reservations by August 26 to ensure availability at the conference rate.

Hope to see you this September in Reno!

Susan & Chrissy

Here are some people you might recognize from last year’s field trip:

WAMLites at Playa de Tijuana during 2018's San Diego meeting — WAMLites at Playa de Tijuana during 2018’s San Diego meeting

New Mapping

Ken Rockwell’s final New Mapping of Western North America, a long-standing feature of the IB, appears in this issue. Thank you, Ken, for your years of service to WAML. Kathy Stroud will be the new column editor. Contact her at kstroud at uoregon.edu.

Benchmarks: People & Jobs

The University of California, Santa Barbara is hiring a Metadata Assistant (Library Assistant IV)
with a particular focus on GIS metadata. jobs.ucsb.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=193695

Other News

The Esri 2019 International User Conference happened the first week of July week in San Diego. You can view the videos of the Plenary sessions and tour the submissions to the Map Gallery. Featured speakers were Jane Goodall and E.O. Wilson. I attended two workshops with ESRI Education Manager, Joseph Kerski. You might find these step-by-step workshop instructions useful in your work. 3 New GIS-Based Lessons: Change over Space and Time, GIS for Beginners, and Teaching and Learning with the Esri Living Atlas of the World. Also, check out Joseph’s blog, Spatial Reserves, a guide to public domain spatial data. Joseph recently gave a workshop at The Geisel Library at the University of California San Diego.
A note from Sierra Laddusaw: Here are the notes I took at the ALA MAGIRT program “Using Innovative, Map-Based Outreach Programs to Reach Students of all Levels.”
Google’s monetization of maps is putting conniving cartographers on the map is a poorly written article, but did you know that “11million business listings on Google Maps are fake at any moment … But since Google profits off these problems, it has little incentive to remove fake businesses — and so far the company has chosen to turn a blind algorithm to rampant map mayhem.”Google Maps to Show Hurricane Forecasts, Earthquake Strike Maps: The app will also soon show navigation warnings when your route may be impacted by a crisis. Wall Street Journal Report
Largest collection of coral reef maps ever made: New global atlas offers a new way to map coral reefs from space. If your library has a Springer subscription, you might have access to the source article here: Coral Reefs June 2019, v.38 (3), pp 467–488. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00338-019-01802-y

Conferences, Classes & Exhibitions

July 16, 2019 – Golden, Colorado The Rocky Mountain Map Society will meet 6-8 PM at Colorado School of Mines, Arthur Lakes Library. Christopher J.J. Thiry has been the Map & GIS Librarian at the Arthur Lakes Library since 1995. He will speak about Historic Mining Maps in the Arthur Lakes Library, Colorado School of Mines. One of the driving motivations of U.S. settlement of the Rocky Mountains was mining. Beginning in the late 1850s, valuable minerals attracted fortune seekers to Colorado. As government organizations helped settle the lawlessness of mining districts, it was necessary to map who had rights to plots of land accurately. Maps painted a picture of mining’s booms and busts, noted prospectors’ names, and showed the development of Colorado’s famous mountain towns. Some of the original maps are works of art. This talk will illustrate Colorado’s historic mining maps using the rich collection of the Arthur Lakes Library. Additional information from Naomi E Heiser
June 29, 2019 – August 25, 2019 – Austin, Texas Mapping Memory: Space and History in 16th-century Mexico can be seen in the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, 200 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. The exhibition features a selection of maps from the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Local artists crafted these unique materials by the commission of the King of Spain to deepen his understanding of his territories in the so-called New World. The exceptional aesthetic value of these maps enhances their ethnographic content. The exhibition coincides with the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Spanish in Mexico, aiming to provoke reflection on the complexities of the conquest of the Americas by acknowledging indigenous perspectives.
September 27-29, 2019 – San Francisco The San Francisco Map Fair will take place in the Forum at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St. The Map Fair is sponsored by the History In Your Hands Foundation, a non-profit organization with a mission to provide classrooms with authentic, historical objects in an effort to help foster a more enriched learning experience. The lecture series portion of the San Francisco Map Fair will be sponsored by the California Map Society. It will consist of three 40 minute lectures followed by a 10 minute Q & A period.
April 25, 2019 – September 30, 2019 – Stanford The David Rumsey Map Center, 557 Escondido Mall, will host an exhibition Coordinates: Maps and Art Exploring Shared Terrain that explore the shared terrain of maps and art. The exhibition marks the celebration of the third anniversary of the opening of the David Rumsey Map Center. The exhibition will feature a variety of ways in which the two porous mediums overlap in inquiries about space, both geographical and metaphorical. Artists include Zoe Leonard, Trevor Paglen, Tauba Auerbach, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Agnes Denes, John Pfahl, Ed Ruscha, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. There will be maps in dialogue with the art, by pioneering cartographers, such as J. C. Fremont, R. Buckminster Fuller, Richard Saul Wurman, Zero per Zero, Charles Joseph Minard, Joseph Salway, F. W. von Egloffstein, J. A. Martignoni, Isaac Frost, Sir David Brewster, and Stanford’s own Dr. Rob Dunbar.
October 10-12, 2019 – Stanford The David Rumsey Map Center is also announcing the second “Barry Lawrence Ruderman Conference on Cartography”t o be held at the Center. For this year’s meeting, all the papers will focus on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and cartography. While some scholars have examined the interplay of gender identities and mapping, particularly with regard to the role of women as buyers and sellers in the historical map market, this work remains isolated and has yet to make a significant impact on the wider field. This conference hopes to offer a counterpoint to this trend by bringing together diverse approaches and hosting interdisciplinary discussions. While all the invited speakers are experts in maps and mapping, they will also bring their specialties in queer, women’s, and gender studies to bear on the nuanced ways in which maps are conditioned by and help to construct, and transgress, gendered and sexualized norms and spaces. Paper topics include mapping masculinity in French Vietnam, women in American cartographic history, the gendered cartographic language of medieval texts, the digital mapping of homosexual spaces, and much more.
October 16-19 – Tacoma, Washington NACIS 2019 will be held in the region this year.
November 7-9, 2019 – ChicagoThe 20th Kenneth Nebenzahl Lectures in the History of Cartography will be held at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St. This year’s series, titled “Redrawing the World: 1919 and the History of Cartography,” commemorates the centennial of the landmark Paris Peace Conference that led to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The series is being organized this year by Peter Nekola (Philosophy, Luther College). He has invited eight others from around the world to present lectures pondering the geopolitical and cartographic impact of the treaty, which relied heavily on cartography in shaping its vision of the world and its future:
- Mirela Altic, University of Zagreb, Drafting the State of the South Slavs: New Cartography for a New Order
- Lindsay Frederick Braun, University of Oregon, Mapping a New Vision of Britain’s African Empire, 1919-1939
- Daniel Foliard, University of Paris, Nanterre, “More than one Palestine”: Nationalist Cartographies, the Middle East and the 1919 Peace Negotiations in Paris
- Jason Hansen, Furman University, Cartographies of Victimhood: Envisioning the Nation after the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919-1920
- Tze-ki Hon, City University of Hong Kong, From Connectivity to Geobody: the 1919 Moment and China’s Role in the World
- Peter Nekola, Luther College, Science and Reasoning in the Delegation Maps of 1919: Humans’ Last and Greatest Attempt to Naturalize Borders, Nations, and Territories
- William Rankin, Yale University, Mapping, Science, and War
- Steven Seegel, University of Northern Colorado, Skin, Lines, Borders: Geographic Expertise and the Mapping of Eastern Europe in 1919
- Penelope Sinanoglou, Wake Forest University, Lines of Control, Lines of Contestation: Cartography and British Imperial Politics in the Middle East Mandates, 1919-1948
  Registration is free and open to the public, though advanced registration is required. To register or for more information, please contact Smith Center Program Assistant Madeline Crispell <crispellm(at)newberry.org> at (312)-255-3575.
April 6-10, 2020 – Denver Join the American Association of Geographers at the AAG Annual Meeting for the latest in research and applications in geography, sustainability, and GIScience. The meeting is an interdisciplinary forum open to anyone with interest in geography and related disciplines. All scholars, researchers, and students are welcome. The five-day conference will host more than 7,000 geographers from around the world and feature over 5,000 presentations, posters, workshops, and field trips by leading scholars, experts, and researchers. Sessions will be organized around many subfields, special tracks, and featured themes.
April 18, 2019 – December 2019- Boulder, Colorado
The Earth Sciences & Map Library, 2200 Colorado Ave., University of Colorado Boulder, will host an exhibition Protect This Land: Making Change Through Visualizationwhich showcases a range of western maps alongside works by notable artists and student creations. The Protect This Land exhibit features both print work and photography, as well as maps that depict the relationship between art and science. Exhibit curator Naomi Heiser said the decision to juxtapose early maps with contemporary prints takes the conversation around the intermingling of art and science to a deeper level.

For other events, see:
Cartography – Calendar of Meetings and Events
Exhibitions

New Maps & Web Sites of Interest

Here’s a good source for wall maps, educational maps, and map murals: World Maps Online. They are based in Seattle.
National Geographic reports: Gorgeous Panoramic Paintings of National Parks Now Online: The iconic illustrations by Austrian artist Heinrich Berann have been digitized in high resolution for the first time, three decades after they were created. The National Park Service released the new images on their newly redesigned online map portal, which also has more than a thousand maps that are freely available for the public to download.
The USGS Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) version 2.0 is now available to help you visualize and analyze PAD-US, America’s official inventory of U.S. terrestrial and marine protected areas.
Unreal City: A Map Of Fictional London [Londonist] Look for your favorite London-based (or thereabouts) novel, film, TV series, comic or computer game.
Population density mapping [via Reddit]: Twist on the traditional population density map. Every area is home to 1.5 million people. The color of the area indicated population density. Scroll down to see each region of the world.
Eleanor Lutz’s Atlas of Space, consists of ten maps made over the course of a year and a half. There’s other great mappy stuff at her website, Tabletop Whale (map prints are available to purchase). (via The Map Room Blog)

Frankenplace — The Solar System, by Eleanor Lutz

Frankenplace is an interactive thematic map search engine that uses geographic context as a means to discover, organize, and interactively visualize the documents related to a search query. The current version of Frankenplace (May 2015) indexes over 5 million articles from the English version of Wikipedia and online travel blog entries. They plan to add additional layers and functionality that will allow users to upload, share, and explore their data. Histography does a similar thing with historical timelines by subject for Wikipedia data.
The Department of Transportation recently released version 2 of the National Address Database.

Publications about Mapping

Two recent articles on California as an island feature many map images from Stanford’s library collection: California, an island? Meet cartography’s most persistent mistake: The Glen McLaughlin Collection brings together more than 700 historical examples of ‘California as an island’ [Big Think]; and, Maps Showing California as an Island [The Public Domain Review]. Check out the latter’s store for available map reproductions.
Also at Big Think, check out the gorgeous maps associated with the world’s watersheds, mapped in gorgeous detail: Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs travels the world while mapping its treasures. See also: Grasshopper Geography for more of this cartographer’s work. Prints are available to purchase.
The World’s Watersheds. Mapped in gorgeous detail

See also: These Amazing Maps Show All the Rivers Running Through the United States
The recently published History of Information Graphics from Taschen looks like a great volume to pick up. From cosmic charts and da Vinci’s Vitruvian Manto the New York subway map: trace the history of visual data from the Middle Ages to the digital era in this XL compendium. Featuring some 400 infographic milestones across technology, cartography, zoology, and more, this is an unprecedented reference work for designers, history buffs, and anyone thirsty for knowledge with a contribution by David Rumsey.
There are some very interesting maps in this Washington Post article, Mapping America’s wicked weather, and deadly disasters.
If you’ve been looking for a Lego Globe, look no further.
Mapping the Past: ARCHAEOLOGY’s editors explore the genius and creativity of mapmakers through time [Archaeology Magazine, May/June 2019]
Maps Showed People Their Worlds: In the 19th century, most Americans weren’t used to seeing maps of their communities. New forms of color lithography changed all that. [JSTOR Daily]
120 Ancient Maps Overlapped on Google Earth Reveal the Growth of Cities Across the World: More than 120 old maps from the David Rumsey Map Collectionwere inserted in Google Maps and Google Earth, allowing us to learn how several parts of the globe were in the past. The maps can be seen by activating the ‘Rumsey Historical Maps’ layer in Google Earth or through a version of Maps developed for the project. [Arch Daily]
The Geography of Partisan Prejudice: A guide to the most—and least—politically open-minded counties in America [The Atlantic]

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